Request for transplants came from West

Request for transplants came from West

26 Jan 2008
Dipak Kumar Dash & Neha Lalchandani,TNN

GURGAON: At D5/29, DLF Phase I, the other house that was raided on Thursday night, the police found an NRI, 53-year-old Joya Mehtab from the US, and a Greek national, 53-year-old Heleni Kitcocy, both on dialysis and waiting for a transplant. They were accompanied by their attendants and detained in the house till Friday afternoon. Later they were sent to a private hospital in Gurgaon.

Lal said that during the raid at DLF, police discovered letters of request for kidney transplants from patients in the UK, the US, Canada and Dubai.

Significantly, the official press release did not mention the name of a 33-year-old Greek woman, Panagotia Gorgia, who also has been detained. Police sources said she was Dr Amit Kumar’s tout in Greece and during the raid at his DLF house, they had discovered a photograph in which they seemed to be quite intimate.

Dr Upender’s nursing home in Ballabhgarh, Faridabad district, Sri Ram Nursing Home, was also raided by a joint team of income tax, police and health department officials on Friday. They reportedly found papers of 40 properties and details of several bank accounts that are yet to be identified.

Lal said the gang targeted the poor and vulnerable, lured them to Gurgaon with the promise of jobs and wielded the knife on them. Most of the victims belonged to the Meerut, Ghaziabad and Moradabad districts of UP. "In certain cases, they claim to have paid between Rs 50,000 and Rs 1 lakh to the people whose kidneys were removed. However, the witnesses we have say they were not given a paisa," Lal said.

He said the team was taken aback to find a fully functional nursing home at the Palam Vihar house which had a fake lawyer’s board outside. "When we raided the premises, we found a patient, Shakeel, who had been operated on only a few hours earlier. The situation was almost similar at DLF I where our team discovered operating units in the basement and rooms for the high-end clients," Lal said.

When the first house was being raided, apparently one person managed to escape and warn those in the DLF house. So, the doctors and the staff managed to escape.

"The DLF house had all facilities for comfortable living and was primarily designed to cater to the needs of high-profile patients. When we raided the house, we found five such people in three rooms and they said they were ignorant about the crime," said ACP (DLF) Sumit Kuhar.

Dr Upender’s driver, Harpal, was part of the gang. He was responsible for maintaining the medical kit in his vehicle, a black Esteem, and apparently used to travel to nearby areas to collect blood samples for identifying donors.

Significantly, all those rescued claimed that they had been picked up from India Gate in a black Esteem.

The three-storey Palam Vihar house was the centre of much curiosity among those working and staying nearby. Surinder Tyagi, a cashier at the petrol pump right across the road from the house, said that in the past six years he had been working there, he had seen people coming to the house at night. "Construction and painting work went on very frequently here. We saw only some Nepalese servants who stayed there along with their families. They used to buy diesel from us very often, 100 litres at a time. Once we asked them what was happening inside and they said it was a hospital, but only meant for rich people," he recalled.

According to neighbours, big cars used to pull up outside the house after 11pm but they did not see anyone.
Lal said the gang had been in this trade for the past eight years and was suspected to have removed and transplanted over 500 kidneys. "They used to get information from hospitals and nursing homes where dialysis was done. From there they used to track down clients," he said.

dipak.dash@timesgroup.com
neha.lalchandani@timesgroup.com

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